Placing Multiple Cloud Computing Bets

Most enterprise IT organizations are not particularly fond of uncertainty, which is why anything to do with cloud computing is at the very least a little unsettling. No one is quite sure which cloud service providers will ultimately prove to be victorious in the enterprise. For example, while there’s almost no doubt that the Amazon and Microsoft Azure clouds will be significant players when it comes to application development, it’s not nearly as clear what role cloud service providers may play in production environments.

The real challenge in the cloud, says Houston, is setting up the service level agreements (SLAs) around any given application workload requirement. In an ideal world, an IT organization wants to be able to take an agnostic approach to the cloud that doesn’t lock them into a particular cloud service provider, while still being able to guarantee service levels. That requires being able to exercise a significant amount of control over cloud service providers via a single management console, says Houston.